this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Summary

RFK Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases, including “prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.”

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals. He has called autism “preventable” and claimed “he can find a cure for the condition by September.”

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[–] pleasegoaway@lemm.ee 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Why is it so hard for some people to believe that there is genetic variation in the human brain?

[–] sunflowercowboy@feddit.org 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Because the genetic variation is confused and muddled by foundational things they can't understand.

Simple things like family structure and the importance of it. A lot of autism overdiagnoses are purely from the developmental differences; economic class, quality of life, nutrition, exposure, and obviously parents or lack there of.

For example, simple acts like kids getting to play in the dirt exposes them to beneficial bacteria. Which I could also see laying the groundwork for gut bacteria. With how common kids do try and eat it, along with developing nations cooking with it, seems at least conceptually plausible.

I believe in autism and am not denying its existence as my fiancée has autism.

I am more saying that there is a huge upbringing differential that can cause kids to experience trauma. Trauma that can give the same responses. Social media enables this issue by pushing kids who don't have access to self identify, pushing a false representation. However, it is good for kids to be trying to put the pieces together - they just need help.

Trauma that can give the same responses.

That's me! Early in therapy for CPTSD, we spent some time trying to determine if I'm autistic or just have autistic tendencies due to CPTSD. Turns out it was the latter.

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[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

The first people Nazi germany systematically exterminated were the disabled

So I guess it means now, that if you're still undiagnosed in the US (and suspect to be autistic), better don't let yourself diagnose... Sad times...

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

he can find a cure for the condition

A "final solution", if you will…

[–] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Their database should track microplastics exposure, pfas exposure, lead exposure, and a whole bunch of other pollution exposure. Bet it won't, because a correlation with those is not a desirable outcome.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Nope, microplastics made it onto the snowflake no-no naughty boo-boo list of words you can't use in government documents anymore. Wish I was making this shit up.

[–] frostysauce@lemmy.world 7 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

That's a pretty big claim for which The New Republic cited absolutely no source. This is bullshit, I hate the Administration as much as anyone here but I'm not falling for this.

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I'm going to try and play devil's advocate here, only because my experience in healthcare suggests to me that this is being sensationalized and there's already enough legitimately awful shit happening without sensationalizing stuff. Now, do want you want, but if you'll check my history, you'll clearly see that I'm not fan of this administration. This doesn't sound all that different in principle from NEMSIS, which is the US government's clearing house for EMS patient care reports that it uses for research purposes. I don't trust RFK, I think he's going to do something monumentally stupid and just go fishing for a way to blame vaccines, but I don't think that this is actually a kill list. Besides, what would be the point of them building a kill list?

Between Palantir building a target list and the NSA mass surveillance program, it would be a huge duplicated effort.

[–] polyploy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

It doesn't have to be a kill list, that's what you're not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that's the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.

You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?

They're already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it's trying to deport without due process, what's to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?

What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It's not duplicated effort, it's part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 10 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Tbh, there's so much damage that's been done, that's being done, and that's going to be done, I'm trying to aggressively filter anything that isn't immediately tangible (the death of due process is immediately tangible, for example) so I don't get totally overwhelmed. I know that there's a strategy Bannon taught them, called "flood the zone with bullshit" that relies on producing so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt that it overwhelms and paralyzes the opposition. That's what I'm trying to guard against.

[–] polyploy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 22 hours ago

That's fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it's also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.

There's absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of "diseased" children is unworthy of alarm though.

I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That's why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 8 points 23 hours ago (5 children)

RFK advocates for people to be forced to work at farms, for the good of their health. You can expect reports of me and other minority folks to be making license plates or being used as forced sex workers.

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[–] frostysauce@lemmy.world 3 points 23 hours ago

Furthermore, this article cites absolutely no source to the claim that this is part of an "autism registry."

I wouldn't put it past RFK Jr. or this administration but I'm calling bullshit.

[–] febra@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

This is just them preparing the launchpad for further mass surveillance programs. First, they'll poke around with innocent sounding programs, testing the waters to see how much data they can sniff out of different private databases without anyone noticing. They'll claim it's for the good of autistic people. They'll enact legislation to further cement their practices of data gathering. If their proof of concept turns out to be delivering results, they'll keep going.

Slowly they'll keep tracking all kinds of people they deem as "ill". They'll start with vilified minorities that can't fight back. Most likely trans people. Then the rest of the queer community. Of course, they'll claim there's no ill intent in gathering this data, after all, it's not like they're going to commit any vile acts.

And slowly but surely, once the public debate around these minorities turns even more sour, you'll have them enacting all kinds of laws, and these databases will prove to be quite handy tools in aiding their goals.

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

There, the anti-science conspiracy theorist sure to fill NIH with self-proclaimed physical therapists, snake oil profiteers, and homeopathy fans.

If it's not killing, it's him wanting to deny the disabled any financial help and government assistance, insisting the disabled are liabilities.

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[–] Noerknhar@feddit.org 191 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Holy shit, do they want to speedrun fascism?

[–] kobra@lemm.ee 205 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Yes. They laid it out with Project 2025 and a staggering amount of people voted for it.

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[–] polyploy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 147 points 1 day ago (10 children)

A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I'll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.

First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It's entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.

I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.

This might sound absurd, but we're seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into "criminals", "gang members", and "terrorists" by similar logic.

Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other "diseased offspring" long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.

How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don't like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK's set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.

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[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 90 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well that's not great. This is the kind of shit why I haven't wanted to get diagnosed. Granted I'm already in it deep for being trans and that resulting million mile paper trail...

Behind the Bastards has a good couple episodes about what happens when people say they can cure autism (spoilers: many children die horribly)

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[–] BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world 104 points 1 day ago (31 children)

It's Eugenics, this is them warming you up to forced sterilisation. This is Timesplitters shit, let's just kill the Billionaires. Come on.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Just a reminder that forced sterilization is still legal in the US, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

[–] raltoid@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Well technically they're warming people up for full blown death-camps.

It starts with tracking, then sterilization, then "work camps", and then suddenly there are hundreds of thousands stuffed into cargo trains on the way to the furnaces.

[–] BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's already here, that's el Salavadore. Specifically I think that's where the human experimentation with neuralink and putting smart tech into your body is really going to get grotesque.

[–] barneypiccolo@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Trump has signed an executive order to build a 30,000 bed detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, and a $249 million contract has already been awarded. It is due to be complete in 2030, but it will open in stages.

For context, the average maximum security prison in America is about 800-1200 people. The largest, in Angola, LA, is about 8300. That means this new detention facility will be almost 4 times larger than our current largest prison, which is already several times larger than average.

Its also going to be on a foreign island, surrounded by a (supposedly) hostile foreign nation, far from the prying eyes of the media or the courts.

So who do they intend on putting in there? He is making it crystal clear that whoever is destined for Camp Gitmo will NOT be recieving trials, or anything resembling Due Process.

Our first concentration camp is being constructed as we speak, Google it.

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[–] isles@piefed.social 45 points 1 day ago

Who's laughing at self-diagnosis now??

Anyway, fuck this place (USA)

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